Kevin Modesti: Making HOF voters judges of steroid users leaves a huge hole in history of the game

In trying to save the baseball Hall of Fame from steroid cheaters, the voters are destroying it.

Since the days of Babe Ruth, the Hall of Fame has played a special role in American sports, handing down the history of the nation's essential game from fathers and mothers to sons and daughters. Veteran baseball writers have cast annual ballots and proclaimed: These were the players fans clamored to see, marveled at, argued about. These were the players who mattered. These were the icons of their eras.

The Hall of Fame became something totally different with Wednesday's announcement that voters have slammed the museum's door on a generation of stars that includes seven-time Most Valuable Player Barry Bonds, seven-time Cy Young Award winner Roger Clemens, and the great former Dodger Mike Piazza, first-time candidates undone by their connection to performance-enhancing drugs.

The Hall of Fame now is the place where steroid suspects are judged.

Voters, many of whom presumably helped to select Bonds and Clemens for all of those awards, have delivered a redacted history to future generations: Bonds' record 762 home runs - didn't happen. Clemens' 4,672 strikeouts - never heard about them. Mark McGwire's and Sammy Sosa's home-run exploits - wash your mouth out. The controversy they inspired - move along, nothing to see here.

Some suggest that those of us who vote for "steroid guys" are apologists for a tainted era. Quite the opposite: We're the ones who are facing reality instead of helping Major League Baseball sweep its mess under the rug.

Let's be clear that PEDs are bad. If their use can't be stopped, their users should be held accountable. The question is whether Hall of Fame voting is the way to do that.

In this year's voting, Craig Biggio got 68.2 percent, coming closest to the 75 percent threshold for enshrinement, while Clemens and Bonds got less than 40 percent and fell far short. Say what you want about the message you send to children if you honor suspected cheaters, but telling kids that Craig Biggio was the towering figure of his era is absurd.

After voting against McGwire on PED grounds in my first years with a ballot, I realized that a voter who focuses on drug questions is condemned to a lifetime of playing sports detective. It's hard enough to decide if a player's achievements on the field are worthy of Cooperstown, without having to decide whom to believe about how he built his muscles.

A majority of voters apparently don't mind; after all, acting as the steroid jury enhances their power and gives them more to write and rant about. But fans and other lovers of the history of baseball should mind.

Starting now, anyone who visits the Hall of Fame plaques in Cooperstown, N.Y., or reads the list of 236 players honored since 1936, must wonder who isn't there because he wasn't great enough and who isn't there because he was a little too great.

The Hall of Fame bestows a high honor. It also preserves history. Voters who are trying to protect the institution's first role are diminishing the second.

The Hall today is a different, lesser place.

Kevin Modesti, a Los Angeles News Group editorial writer, was a sports writer and editor for 25 years and is a baseball Hall of Fame voter.